The Digital Marketing and the Customer Buying Process

The explosion of digital marketing technologies has not eliminated the need to understand the customer. In fact, Hank Barnes explains that all this technology makes understanding the customer’s context ever more important.

Transcript

As we moved into digital, the world of marketing is continuing to change. Everyone’s talking about digital marketing and the idea of a marketing technologist and marketing operations, and we are seeing lots of different technologies that are available for marketers to use, whether that be location tools, tracking, personalization technologies, content technologies, social marketing.

What’s available continues to grow, but behind all of that we still come back to one fundamental thing, and marketing is and always has been about the customer, and now more than ever because the customer has access to all of the same tools and all of the same information sources.

What we have to make sure of what we are doing as marketers in the technology era and the digital era is to find ways to make the customer buying process easier. So this isn’t necessarily about us driving the conversation, it’s about us guiding the conversation based on how the customer wants things to occur.

It’s using information to understand what they’ve done and what they haven’t to figure out where there may be holes in their buying process that needs filled, where there may need to be clarification and where you need to dive deeper.

So the main thing is that we need to recognise that all of this great technology that’s available to us to change the buying experience only works if it is applied in the context of the customer.

As we moved into digital, the world of marketing is continuing to change. Everyone’s talking about digital marketing and the idea of a marketing technologist and marketing operations, and we are seeing lots of different technologies that are available for marketers to use, whether that be location tools, tracking, personalization technologies, content technologies, social marketing.

What’s available continues to grow, but behind all of that we still come back to one fundamental thing, and marketing is and always has been about the customer, and now more than ever because the customer has access to all of the same tools and all of the same information sources.

What we have to make sure of what we are doing as marketers in the technology era and the digital era is to find ways to make the customer buying process easier. So this isn’t necessarily about us driving the conversation, it’s about us guiding the conversation based on how the customer wants things to occur.

It’s using information to understand what they’ve done and what they haven’t to figure out where there may be holes in their buying process that needs filled, where there may need to be clarification and where you need to dive deeper.

So the main thing is that we need to recognise that all of this great technology that’s available to us to change the buying experience only works if it is applied in the context of the customer.

Creating the right environment to connect with customers, employees and partners is not just about doing the same thing we have always done. If we do more of the same thing we don’t have the right frame of reference. The Business Modernization framework is a way to look at all aspects of the business and identify what the new way to operate should be, identify the technology that can enable that, then identify the culture shifts and the change that needs to happen to enable the business to be effective in today's environment.